[Cubytus]

dreyfus, are you sure you don't LIE or exaggerating a bit too much? What kind of person except one having serious money AND mental illness would buy 2 to 3 machines a YEAR only for PERSONAL, not professional use? That's a machine every 4 to 6 months! Normal people change machines by 4 years, tech savy ones once every 2 years. Nowhere near once every 4 month madness. Even by professional standards it's way too high, unless one uses portable Macs as bulletproof vests in war zones.

Back to topic, I have to confirm that sometimes, Apple does ship flaky hardware, but it's often limited numbers of machines (of course, absolute number are high, but we're talking about hundreds of machines out of hundreds of thousands shipped machines, less than 1% - Compare that to Acer's 30% failure rate in the first 6 months, or Clevo's 25%). From my experience, I know that the firsts MacBooks unibody had real problems with their AirPort cards (4 cards changes in 6 months here), and indeed, one Genius confirmed that he saw unusually high repair requirements for AirPort problems in this particular machine.

This, the missing FireWire port, no real benefit over an upgraded white-MacBook and the fact that Apple heavily bumped its specs quite fast after its launch without increasing the price tells me the MacBook unibody really was a transition machine, and maybe a testbed for a new manufacturing process.

But I used many Macs over the years (not mines, unfortunately), and when there were issues with them, it was because of too many software upgrades without hardware upgrades (a G4 tower with Tiger, a truckload of heavy scientific and virtualization software, but only 128MB RAM. What the heck ? ; iBook G4 1GHz, Tiger, Safari 3, NeoOffice, but just 256MB RAM). Other Macs I used were fine (first-gen white MacBook, complete with yellowing, cracks, loose screen piece, and a dead battery from too many cycles, but no performance issue; CRT iMac, eMacs, PowerMac G5, old-school G3 tower, first-gen Mac Mini, all were running fine.)

What Apple doesn't do right, though, is sometimes they don't recognize their hardware is faulty, even in private between them and the customer. That really stinks, especially where there are no Apple Store to go, and only shipping fees to pay.

[dreyfus]

Cubytus said:

dreyfus, are you sure you don't LIE or exaggerating a bit too much? What kind of person except one having serious money AND mental illness would buy 2 to 3 machines a YEAR only for PERSONAL, not professional use? That's a machine every 4 to 6 months! Normal people change machines by 4 years, tech savy ones once every 2 years. Nowhere near once every 4 month madness. Even by professional standards it's way too high, unless one uses portable Macs as bulletproof vests in war zones.

Pardon? I was not talking about 3 notebooks, but 3 Macs per year average since 2004 and there is nothing insane about it. I have a Mac Pro in the study, an iMac in the living room, four minis (one running as a server and three as media hubs), one 17" MBP (PowerBook previously) for photography and video work and one "light" notebook for casual use and for trips (previously a 12" PowerBook, now a MacBook Air). If I have eight machines and replace them in regular intervals (with laptops being replaced more often), having 18 machines in 5-6 years is nothing abnormal.

[Cubytus]

That's precisely what I call insanity when it comes to buying Macs.

The MacPro is powerful enough to replace the 4 Minis in their role (with multiple hard drives), and even an old PC with Linux woud make a very decent VNC client to run the MacPro from the living room. Admittedly, the MBP and MB air don't quite fill the same requirements. If you do photo and video for a living, the MBP should count as a professional use machine.

Well, I'm still happy to read that recession hasn't hit everyone yet, considering that you indicate to spend more than CDN$4 000 each year on computer equipment just for personal use while your work Macs are given by your employer, I want your job :D

[dreyfus]

Cubytus said:

The MacPro is powerful enough to replace the 4 Minis in their role (with multiple hard drives), and even an old PC with Linux woud make a very decent VNC client to run the MacPro from the living room. Admittedly, the MBP and MB air don't quite fill the same requirements. If you do photo and video for a living, the MBP should count as a professional use machine.

Not exactly... one Mini runs OS X Server. It works as a mail, database and Web server. Putting that on the Mac Pro that is sometimes running all eight cores at 100% when Compressor is doing its job would be disastrous. The three others are connected to TV sets... my girlfriend would kill me if I ran cables all through the house. So, those have to stay. The iMac is needed if my government and I want to do something simultaneously. VNC would also not be a solution while the Mac Pro is rendering or compressing, and applying some color corrections or advanced filters to HD video keeps it busy for multiple hours. The private MBP is not really for professional use, but even my private camcorder is a rather good one recording DVCPRO HD, so having a 1920x1200 pixels screen and ExpressCard/eSATA connectivity is a must and I want a matte screen, so the 17" is really the only option. The only real "luxury item" is the MacBook Air... of course I could lug around the 17" MBP, but sometimes I do not really want to :-)

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Well, I'm still happy to read that recession hasn't hit everyone yet, considering that you indicate to spend more than CDN$4 000 each year on computer equipment just for personal use while your work Macs are given by your employer, I want your job :D

This is really a point of view thing... Yes, recession has not hit us at all so far (balance-wise) and I am happy about it. On the other side, there has not been a single week with less than 75 "official" (billed) work hours since last September and I gave up on counting the unpaid ones.